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Berkshires

Wintertime Blues

Likely a bluejay made the swoop
from roof eave to spruce bough,
and etched a lazy ‘u’ over the field beyond the window.

But the window pane, and the gazer,
are beclouded enough for this artist
of a January thaw to be recorded as a bluebird.

Next winter, the scene becomes a blue balm.

Dave Read

Filed Under: Berkshires, Current

Let Them Linger

These dandelion lawns, that line
the lanes and streets that lead us

Into tempting towns & cities, where
stone holds sway all year long.

Dave Read

Filed Under: Berkshires, Epigrams

Pivot of Spring

Molder of forsythia underfoot
signals the imminent breath
of lilac on a nearby bush.

It’s the pivot of Spring

in the Berkshires – a place
of pictures ever fading
into pictures ever fresh
.

Dave Read

“… what but picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills? – galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh.” Herman Melville, Piazza Tales.

Filed Under: Berkshires, Epigrams, Poems

Peeskawso Peak

Come along William Culllen Bryant,
let us beckon Melville, Hawthorne to convene,
along with Umpachanee and Konkapot – all the best

Shall meet at Monument Mountain, and follow
Mohican Monument Trail, through the seasons
of the soul, to Peeskawso Peak, and there to rest.

Dave Read

Peeskawso is a Mohican word for “virtuous woman.”

Literary Shrine in the Berkshires

What Lourdes, France is for global religious tourism, Monument Mountain is for devotees of American literature. A sudden cloudburst brought Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville shoulder to shoulder as they sought refuge under an outcropping en route to a very fancy picnic on the summit of Monument Mountain on August 5, 1850.

Taking the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires, Monument Mountain, Juky 2021; Mathew Lavalette photo.
Taking the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires, Monument Mountain, Juky 2021; Mathew Lavalette photo.

Same mountain, earlier poem:

Paean to an Eminence

This geologic oddment in the Berkshires,
our bald uncle, with busted nose, looms

where echo of the penultimate Mohican sounds,
unperturbed by pale poets, disturbers of myth,
who revere the Hawthorne-Melville rain delay.

Snug as it would fit in the hopper of majestic Mount Greylock,
for us with tastes prosaic, Monument Mountain is our pet rock.

– Dave Read
(Paean to an Eminence was published by Trustees of Reservations, 2008, Views of Monument Mountain.)

Filed Under: Berkshires, Epigrams

Judging April

April is graded in the northeast by her work
toward the detonation of forsythia, which
converts neighborhood street corners and

Highway interstices into explosions of
sunshine for two weeks, max – and while that
shrub returns to ordinary and ungainly, a good

April hands the baton to May, who gets all the glory!

Dave Read

Filed Under: Berkshires, Current

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